The Carpentin Hours is one of the most dazzling manuscripts illuminated in Bruges at the height of the so-called Northern Renaissance, and it is also one of the least known.Made for Jean de Carpentin (d. 1501), a gentleman from Picardy, the manuscript was illuminated in the early 1470s by one of the most celebrated artists of the period, known to posterity as the Master of the Dresden Prayer Books. This illuminator, active in the Burgundian Netherlands from the late 1460s to c. 1520, was iconographically ingenious, compulsively inventive, and exceptionally skilled. Jean de Carpentin’s book of hours is among the finest examples of his work.

The manuscript remained in the family’s hands until 1927. In 1940 it was stolen from a Parisian bank vault by Nazi forces. After the war it was returned to its owner in New York, where it remained unseen until 1997.